


blackbird bluebird soldier spy

by goblinjammy (mayerwien)



Category: Alias (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Cross-Generational Friendship, Dysfunctional Family, Family, Father-Daughter Relationship, Gen, Spy Daddy, Spy Daughter, Take Your Daughter to Work
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-07-07
Updated: 2014-07-20
Packaged: 2018-02-07 20:43:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,650
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1913181
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mayerwien/pseuds/goblinjammy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Six-year-old Sydney Bristow has just lost her mother in a car accident. On the bright side, she’s learned that her dad has possibly the coolest job ever. | AU where Sydney willingly participates in Project Christmas from childhood.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. the exception

**Author's Note:**

> #1 - the exception
> 
> Jack offers Sydney a choice.

Sydney knows it’s really serious when her father calls her into the living room and asks her to sit across from him on the couch. (He’s serious even when he’s brushing his teeth, but anything that involves eye contact with him for extended periods of time gets filed under _“really_ serious.”) It’s Saturday morning, and normally she’d be eating cereal in front of the TV. But now there is silence, and sunlight piercing the curtains, and the smell of her father’s aftershave hanging in the air.

“Sydney,” he says quietly, “do you remember what I told you about my job?”

She nods. As if she can forget.

“Okay.” He breathes out and leans forward, elbows on his knees. “One of the things I was working on for the CIA was... a project. It was called Project Christmas.” And he proceeds to explain it to her, slowly. How the project was designed to discover children with special abilities. Abilities that, when they get older, will help them work for the CIA, too.

That she is one of those children.

“The blocks,” Sydney blurts out, putting the pieces together. “All the science stuff you were asking me about.” She knows she should feel special, but she also feels betrayed. She thought she and her dad had just been bonding.

“That’s right. Sydney, listen to me, because this is important. The participants in Project Christmas aren’t supposed to know what they’re doing. But I asked the CIA if they could make an exception for you, because—if you say yes—you’ll be the first. You’re not going to be a spy... at least not yet. We’re just going to help you develop your skills, and when you’re older, you can decide for yourself if this is what you want.”

Her breath is stuck in her throat. Her dad is waiting, and she can see, suddenly, that so much depends on her answer.

Sydney knows she isn’t close to her dad. He goes on business trips, misses Parents’ Days at school, misses birthdays. It was always Mom who read to her, surprised her with cookies in her lunchbox, tucked her in and kissed her goodnight. But Mom’s not here anymore.

And maybe this is it. The connection with her dad she’s been looking for.

“Okay,” she whispers.

“Sydney... you don’t have to say yes. I’m not forcing you to—“

“I want to,” she says, more forcefully, and her dad looks visibly relieved. He leans back against the couch and exhales.

Then he says, “You can’t tell anyone, Sydney. Do you understand? Not even Will and Francie.”

Sydney considers this. Just last week Francie made all of them friendship bracelets out of different colors of yarn, as a sign that they would tell each other everything. (Will had groaned about how bracelets were for girls, but Francie used blue and red yarn for his, Superman colors, so he couldn’t really complain.)

“Not even a hint?” she ventures, even though she knows what the answer will be.

“Not even a hint. If they ask, just say that we had a hard time finding a babysitter, so you’ll be coming to the office with me after school.”

Sydney fingers the pink and green threads knotted around her wrist. She looks at her dad, at the lines between his eyebrows.

She nods again. “Okay.”

He lays a folder and a pen on the coffee table in front of her. “You have to sign these forms. To make it official.”

The print on the forms is small, and the words are long. Sydney reaches for the pen, then hesitates, glancing up at her dad. “You always say not to sign anything unless you know what it says.”

A half-smile touches the corner of his mouth, and Sydney thinks that is pride, somewhere deep in his eyes. “I’ll tell you what it says. That you’re entering this program of your own free will. That you promise to keep it a secret. And that if what we’re asking you to do is too difficult, you can stop, anytime.”

She squints at him, and this time she is joking. “How do I know I can trust you?”

For a second, her dad looks totally stunned—so much that Sydney wishes she could take back what she said. But then he tells her, quite gravely, “Because I’m your dad, sweetheart. I’m—I’m a spy, but I’m your dad _first._ And that means I will never, ever let anything bad happen to you.” The faint glimmer in his eyes has been replaced with something both dark and intense. For some reason, she thinks of a picture of a supernova she saw in one of her books.

He leans forward, and covers her hand with one of his own. “Ever.”

Sydney hasn’t come up with a signature yet, but he assures her that just printing her name will do. And she does—S-Y-D-N-E-Y A-N-N-E B-R-I-S-T-O-W, right next to her father’s.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So this is the first of a series of quick oneshots that I'm hoping to do for "Alias"! I'm trying to learn to write faster without always second-guessing and editing along the way, and I thought this'd be a good way to practice. Also I just really love the show, and this what-if has been in my head for weeks now. Enjoy!


	2. new recruits

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> It’s not a typical day at work for young CIA agent Michael Vaughn. For one thing, there is a kindergartener running around in his handler’s office. And for another, he seems to have misplaced his wallet.

The first thing everyone says to Vaughn when he walks into the office that morning is, “Jack’s back.” They say it with _something_ in their voices; he can’t figure out if it’s an ‘ooh, you’re in _trouble’_ something (like it usually is), or just a ‘be sensitive’ something.

It must have been hard for him, Vaughn thinks, skirting around a desk while fiddling with his tie. Must still be hard. God knows what it feels like, to lose your wife so suddenly. Jack kept on working even right after the accident, but the look in his eyes was so haunted that Develin finally forced him out the door one day, _ordering_ him to take a break.

 _Okay, act normal, act normal,_ Vaughn chants to himself. He tries to arrange his features into what he hopes is an apppropriate expression as he walks towards Jack’s office. Not overly hey-welcome-back cheery, not overly despondent either. Attentive. Open. Ready for duty.

Vaughn knows he argues with Jack way more than any other agent and their handler do. He can’t help it; the man is a holy terror. None of Vaughn’s research compilations are ever thorough enough, none of his tech analyses ever accurate enough, none of his field assignments ever clean enough for Jack Bristow. Weiss keeps telling him to put in a request to change handlers. On nights when Vaughn collapses into bed, muscles knotted tight with pain and his ears still ringing from Jack’s shouting over comms, he seriously considers it.

And yet—he can’t bring himself to actually do it. Jack is harsh, but it’s because he’s _good._ (Vaughn’s seen the tapes. Krakow, Venezuela, Cote d’Ivoire. The one labeled simply ‘1976’ actually gave him nightmares at one point.) He expects the same quick reflexes and cold, calculated thinking from everyone around him.

Sometimes Vaughn wonders if he will one day turn into him. If he _aspires_ to.

The door is slightly ajar, and he knocks twice lightly. “Sir?”

A muffled voice says something, there is a brief scuffling sound, and then Jack is opening the door. “Agent Vaughn,” he says briskly. He looks older, but not as tired as he did four months ago. And he’s not wearing black anymore, Vaughn notices. _Is that good or bad?_ “Come in.”

The first thing he notices is that the window blinds have been opened—Jack normally keeps them closed, even when he’s reading. The second thing he notices is that there is a little girl with straight hair sitting behind Jack’s desk, meticulously hooking paper clips onto one another to make a chain.

“Agent Vaughn, this is my daughter, Sydney.” Jack clears his throat awkwardly. “Sweetheart, come say hello. This is Agent Vaughn; he works with Daddy.” The girl slides bodily off the desk chair and trots over slowly.

Sweetheart? _Daddy?_ “Hi,” says Vaughn cautiously. He isn’t sure if he’s good with kids. He hasn’t spent enough time around them to know. “I’m Mi—I’m Agent Vaughn.”

“Hello.” The girl—Sydney—is wearing a white T-shirt and denim overalls, stiff new orange sneakers, and a daisy barrette in her hair. She does not approach him, but watches him with round brown eyes while standing at a safe distance, close to her father.

Vaughn stares at the two of them, at the man he’s come to think of as his own personal slave driver, whose face is now softer than he’s ever seen it. _Did he put that barrette in her hair this morning?_ he wonders. Does he make her grilled cheese sandwiches? Videotape her Christmas pageants at school?His imagination is struggling to perform.

Jack puts a hand on his daughter’s shoulder and asks, “Didn’t you say you needed to go to the bathroom?”

“Da-aaad,” moans Sydney, ducking behind Jack and running back to the desk.

“She’s at a shy stage.” Jack looks almost apologetic until he changes the subject. “You are aware, I take it, of Project Christmas?”

“Your—yes, sir.” Vaughn shakes himself out of his momentary stupor.

“Sydney is our first qualified participant,” continues Jack. “She starts her training on Monday, but I thought I’d get her accustomed to being here. That said, I apologize for...leaving you in the lurch when I did. I’ll be busy overseeing Sydney’s training for the next few weeks, but eventually I will return to my full duties as your case officer.” 

Vaughn fights back a grin. Somehow he doesn’t find it surprising at all that the child most qualified for Project Christmas is the daughter of the man who created it. “That’s okay. It’s...” He swallows. “It’s just good to have you back, sir.”

Jack nods slightly—all the acknowledgment he will ever give.

“Dad?”

Both men look down at Sydney, who is now standing between them, the paper clip chain draped fashionably around her neck. Deciding this is a good time to try again, Vaughn bends down so the two of them are eye level. “That’s a very pretty necklace you’ve got there,” he says cheerfully, indicating the paper clips. “Did you make that all by yourself, big girl?”

Sydney just blinks at him, then looks up at Jack. “Dad, can I get a Coke?”

“Sure, honey. You know where the vending machine is?”

“Uh-huh.” Sydney slides past and runs out the door. He can hear her sneakers thumping down the hall outside.

Jack raises an eyebrow. “I’ll thank you not to condescend to my daughter in future, Agent Vaughn,” he says dryly. “She may only be six years old, but is highly intelligent for her age.”

Vaughn realizes he is still crouching and straightens up, rubbing the back of his neck. “Yes, sir.”

“She scored well above average on her advanced visual-spatial reasoning test. Much higher than you or I ever could.”

“Yes, sir.” Can he be fired for talking down to his case officer’s daughter? Vaughn starts to feel a little faint.

“She is the first of a group of people who will comprise the future of this very agency.”

“Understood, sir.” He can already hear himself being summoned to Devlin’s office. See the looks on the other agents’ faces as he is frog-marched out the door.

Jack cocks his head to one side. “On that note, I don’t recall giving Sydney money for the vending machine. When was the last time you checked your wallet, Agent Vaughn?”

Vaughn claps his hand to his back pocket, freezes, and then looks sheepishly at his handler.

And Jack actually _laughs._

Vaughn raises his hands, utterly defeated. “Sir, can I say something?”

“Yes?”

“Thank God she’s on our side, sir.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay yeah so I made Vaughn older; somehow it just felt right. Sorry to all you Syd/Vaughn shippers out there! But I promise this fic won’t be completely devoid of any ~feelings~ between them (albeit the one-sided, little kid crush kind).


	3. the lowdown

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After one week at the CIA, Sydney’s adjusted just fine.

On Monday, Sydney’s dad takes her to a bare little room, with no furniture but a square table with scuffed legs. He gives her a white plastic stool to sit on, and takes out a box of Lego.

“Watch me closely,” he says, and proceeds to click the Lego pieces together until he has built an uneven, teetering contraption, with gaps and parts that stick out. (If it weren’t so quiet, Sydney would think it was funny, seeing her dad playing with Lego.) She barely has time to look at the whole finished thing before he breaks it apart. But she finds that if she concentrates, she can replay her dad putting the bricks together like a movie and rebuild the tower with little trouble.

Then her dad takes out a laptop and puts on a video of a sunny park. A family is picnicking on the grass, a mom and a dad and three kids. There is also a fluffy white dog with a long tail, playing tug-of-war with the dad for one of his shoes.

Sydney watches the video for less than a minute before it stops. When it does, her dad spreads out eight different black and white photos of kids’ faces on the table, and asks her to pick out the three in the video. This is easy. Then he asks what each kid was wearing. It takes a while for Sydney to remember, but she does—a green striped blouse on the girl, head-to-toe black on the older boy, and red baseball cap and Bugs Bunny T-shirt on the younger.

Then he gives her five different squares of cloth, and asks her which of the squares is the same as the picnic blanket the family was using.

In disbelief, Sydney wrinkles her nose at her dad. “Is that really important?”

“We don’t know what could be important,” he tells her. “So everything is important.”

Later they stop to take a break. A lot of people greet them as they walk through the building to the cafeteria. It’s weird for Sydney to see so many people calling her dad “sir,” or even “Agent Bristow.” She tries studying their faces to see which of them mean it, and which of them are just sucking up.

On Tuesday, Sydney receives a crisp uniform and a white belt that is so long she has to loop it four times around her waist, and is led to a room bigger than the gym at school, with graying walls and a squashy blue mat on the floor.

Her teacher is Sensei Kellen, who is a small middle-aged woman, but who is incredibly strong and fast. She introduces herself to Sydney by way of splitting a thick wooden board in half with the side of her hand, and giving her the pieces to observe the clean  break.

“The most important thing you must learn is that you have to protect yourself,” Sensei says. “Forget about sparing your opponent. In the real world, there will be threats to your life. Your job is to remove those threats at any cost.”

That day, Sydney does so much stretching that when she is done she feels a whole foot taller. She learns what the most sensitive parts of the body are. The eyes. The throat. The soft part above the stomach, which she now knows is called the solar plexus. As a bit of a bonus, she also learns how to escape from a plastic zip tie by slamming her wrists down over her back. (She asks Sensei Kellen if she can teach her how to escape from finger cuffs, too, but the look she receives in return makes her think this is not a problem agents normally encounter.)

On Wednesday, Sydney stays in her dad’s office, and he starts to teach her Italian. The quality of his voice changes when he speaks it, and it half makes her grin, and half makes her feel like she knows him even less than she already does.

“Good morning” in Italian is _buon giorno_. “Good afternoon” is _buona sera_. While her dad speaks slowly and clearly and asks her to repeat the phrases back to him, Sydney studies his face, his eyes behind his glasses. She wants to reach out and smooth the lines from his forehead.

“My name is Sydney” is _mi chiamo_ _Sydney_. “Please” is _grazie_.

Not for the first time that week, she wonders if her dad has ever killed anyone.

_Buona notte_ is goodbye, and good night.

_“Tutto bene?”_ he asks her then, his forehead wrinkling slightly, and she replies, _“Bene, Papa.”_

On Thursday, Sydney’s dad introduces her to a young man with a friendly, open face named Marshall Flinkman. Together they take apart a lock and show her the pins inside, how the lock can be picked with a paper clip or a hairpin.

Sydney likes Marshall at once. He talks to her like she’s a real agent—but he also explains all his tools and everything he does with examples she can understand. True, it’s with a lot of stammering and sidetracking along the way, but she doesn’t mind. When training is over, Marshall also lets her check out the games on his computer; he highly recommends Myst, but she chooses JumpStart instead.

“Can you put jets on stuff?” Sydney asks him, in between hunting for Frankie the dog’s buried bones with the Detect-O-Matic. “Like Rollerblades?”

“Oh, gosh, well—“ Marshall looks excited at the prospect, but then he sees her dad’s face and clears his throat. “Ah, what I mean is, I don’t think I’ve quite gotten the hang of, um, jet-powered Rollerblades. But uh, perhaps in a few more years?”

When they get home, Sydney runs to her bedroom, locks the door with the push button on the inside knob, and then tries to pick the lock from the outside. She pretends bad guys with guns are chasing her, but her fingers can’t get a good grip on the paper clip, and she can’t hit the pins the way Marshall showed her. She drops the clip to the floor and lets out a small growl of frustration; a few seconds later, she realizes with a sinking feeling that her failure means she won’t be able to get into her room.

Behind her, Sydney’s dad clears his throat, and she turns to see him holding out the key to her. “Don’t be upset if you don’t get it right the first time,” is all he says, quietly, and that stays with her, even years later.

On Friday, Sydney does nothing but answer questions; this sort of training is like playing a game, she is told, where it’s up to her to find out the rules as she goes along. She also gets to do it while eating a snack, or drawing, or whatever else she wants, as long as she can pay attention. She also gets to ask her own questions until each situation becomes more clear—this is the ‘finding out the rules’ part.

“What would you do if you found out your best friend lied to you?” her dad asks, and Sydney asks in return, while filling in the roof of a house with her brick red crayon, “What did she lie about?”

_What if you found out your classmate was planning to cheat on a test?_ is another one, and she responds, “Does she usually cheat?” _What if you broke an expensive vase at home?_ and “How did I break it?”Her dad asks follow-up questions, about why she would do this, or what that would make her feel.

There are no right or wrong answers, but even so, Sydney quickly finds that she does not like being asked so many questions.

Just before the session ends, she is introduced to another kind of training that her dad calls it _strengthening the will._ “There are bad people out there, Sydney,” he says, “who can take away memories. Change them. To fight that, you have to have some things you can hold on to. Things that you know to be true, without a doubt.”

So she makes a list. _My name is Sydney Bristow._

_My birthday is April 17._

_I am an American._

_My best friends are Francie Calfo and Will Tippin._

In the months to come, her dad will call in a CIA psychiatrist who is also trained in hypnosis. The psychiatrist will hook Sydney up to a machine, and then suggest that her name is Cindy, or Jessie, or Molly. But she will hang on to that list—repeat what she knows to be true, over and over, until it drowns out everything else—and she will know.

On Saturday, her dad takes her to Miceli’s for dinner, as a treat for a job well done. (This will, in time, become routine. The rest of the time they will mostly get takeout, and once in a while Jack will make macaroni and cheese from scratch, but Saturday nights will always be special.)

Sydney fingers the edge red checkered tablecloth and scissor-kicks her legs. She resents having to sit on a cushion just to be able to reach the table properly. Puffing up her cheeks like the Big Bad Wolf, she blows towards the candle in the center of the table and watches the little flame dance from side to side.

“Sydney, don’t do that,” her dad says warningly.

Obediently, she stops puffing, and turns her attentions instead to the glass of dark red liquid in front of him. “What are you drinking, Daddy?”

“Pinot noir,” he replies. “It’s a wine.”

Sydney leans forward and opens her mouth like a bird. Clearly amused, her dad puts the glass to her lips and tips some of the wine onto her tongue. She swallows and then pulls a face. “Ew,” she pronounces. “It tastes like—like grape juice and pee.”

Her dad chuckles. “It’s an acquired taste. Perhaps one day when you’re older you’ll deign to have a bottle with me,” he says. Taking the glass back, he raises it, and Sydney happily clinks her own Italian strawberry soda against it.

A waiter with a towel on his arm floats by to check on them. “Is everything to your satisfaction?” he asks, leaning in and beaming—and Sydney replies without missing a beat, _“Molto bene, signore. Grazie.”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, this one took a long time! Am busy writing thesis in the real life, which is the farthest possible thing from this fanfic, but this gives me a much-needed break. :)


End file.
